presenting resources in API

Question

im preparing Rails 5 API and i have some GET endpoints which do nothing but presenting resources to enduser.

how can i limit what the user can see. Lets say i have a table Books, with title and author columns, i want the enduser to get his book with a title and an author but i dont want to give him stuff like :id or timestamps. is there an existing solution similar to what grape has to offer with present() and Grape::Entity classes?

Answer 1

The cleanest way to do this would be with a serializer.

# app/serializers/book_serializer.rb
class BookSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :title, :author
end

Then in the controller:

def show
  book = Book.find(params[:id])
  render json: book, serializer: BookSerializer
end